On the occasion of the passage in the hall on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 March at the MACRO of Rome, we met Matteo Billi, co-author of the docufilm Giulio Regeni – All the evil of the world directed by Simone Manetti.
Your project, defined by yourself and by the other author Emanuele Cava “an act of active citizenship”, is the first and only to tell and document the story of Giulio. How did you win the resistance and conquered the trust of his parents Claudio and Paola and his lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, who assisted them in the long legal battle that in 2023, eight years after Giulio’s disappearance, led to the trial against four agents of the Egyptian National Security?
Everything started more than three years ago when Emanuele Cava, for a series of circumstances, had the opportunity to meet Alessandra Ballerini and Giulio’s parents. It was a long courtship, because Giulio’s parents refused before our many other projects of documentaries, films, comics and books. We probably managed to get him to know that we would follow their way to tell the story. In the meantime, the process began and therefore the will to insert in a documentary account what was taking place at the Court of Assisi in Rome, that is, a process that for eight years have tried to celebrate.
The message is what we collected from Giulio’s family. Paola and Claudio Regeni have conducted a battle for Giulio that lasts ten years and continue to carry it forward not only for Giulio but for all of us. Where this battle ended with a sentence, it would be a great warning for all regimes, a warning of this tenor: “You know that even if in your regime you are able to live in absolute impunity, democracies from all over the world look at you, they are standing on your neck and if you hurt our citizens someone in another country will try to get the truth.”.
Giulio was a PhD student in Political and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, which arrived in 2015 in Cairo to deepen his studies on the role of independent unions and workers in the post-Mubarak period, a sensitive issue for the al-Sisi regime. During his stay at the Cario, has he ever been intimidated and aware of his vulnerability in a dangerous context, known by the strategy of terror against activists, researchers and opponents?
Giulio has always been very aware of the context in which he worked, he has never underestimated the potential dangers for any foreign citizen interested in deepening the political and social situation of Egypt. He was very aware, he always took all the precautions of the case but what happened probably was not imaginable; On the other hand, we do not forget that Giulio was not the only researcher working in Egypt, before him and together with him there were many other researchers engaged in Cairo with their projects, but before then never the Egyptian regime had gone so far.
We have limited ourselves to recounting the trial for what concerns the kidnapping, torture and murder of Giulio, a process in which the defendants were four high officers of the Egyptian army. We have confined ourselves to rebuilding that truth, that to kidnap, torture and kill Giulio were men belonging to Egyptian intelligence.
Another theme given the right emphasis in your docufilm is that of betrayal. Giulio will be betrayed by his Egyptian roommate, the head of the independent street trade union in Cairo Mohamed Abdallah and the Egyptian authorities and media who will do everything first to discredit the image then to depistare the investigation of his death. Why does Abdallah perceive it as a threat and sell it to the Egyptian authorities? If he hadn’t been betrayed he could have saved himself?
Surely the betrayals against Giulio are a fundamental part of this affair and the docufilm. It is difficult to hypothesize about what would have happened without these betrayals, but the whole of betrayals only confirms the climate in which they have matured, the climate of paranoia that was breathed and is still breathing in Egypt of al-Sisi, which pervades first institutions and then also common citizens.
Giulio disappeared on January 25, 2016, the fifth anniversary of the Revolution of January 25, to be found with evident signs of torture nine days later, on February 3, in a ditch at the edge of the Cairo-Alessandria highway. Your work, premiered on January 26, 2026 – ten years after its disappearance – at the New Sacher of Nanni Moretti is a huge contribution to memory. How much cinema can affect collective memory?
Cinema and all art in general have an exceptional power in preserving and handing down memory, multiplying and amplifying, through images, stories and emotions, messages. We believe that this was one of the reasons that led Giulio’s family to allow the realization of our documentary. Both parents and lawyer Ballerini were aware that a work, in this case a docufilm, which had been distributed in the greatest number of cinemas possible and therefore made known to a public as much as possible would multiply and amplify their message, allowing them to reach the goal prefixed that not to reduce the drama of Giulio to a private dimension but to deliver it to the largest public dimension.
In the docufilm the direction and the installation are studied specifically for a purpose, to create in the viewer a sense of uncertainty, uncomfortableness, growing anguish thanks to shattering sequences and dirty frames, contorts recovered by a series of founds, footage shot by other people for other purposes. What inspired you in this choice?
Everything started from the video “rubbed” by the trade unionist Abdallah, shot with a hidden camera probably provided by the Egyptian secret services, in which Giulio is spyed. That video inspired us because we thought that that kind of stolen recovery could somehow direct the entire direction of the documentary: as Giulio had to have lived those moments of great instability and insecurity so he had to have been for the whole of Al-Sisi Egypt, daily forced to live that same state of uncertainty. We were then convinced that to tell the context around Giulio that was the right language.
L’articolo Giulio Regeni – All the evil of the world. Interview with Matteo Billi comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
